Religion
In reply to the discussion: How can religious moderates be said to enable hateful fundamentalists? [View all]LTX
(1,020 posts)I think you are overlooking the flexibility of empirical confirmation in human nature. By routinized observation, there is faith that the car will be in the garage (although in the event of, say, its theft, or its replacement with a 1967 Volkswagen Van by an unpredictable teenager, this faith could be shaken). By equally routinized observation, there is faith that loving your neighbor (or parent, or child, or spouse, etc.) will yield positive emotional and often practical outcomes. The source of the faith in the latter instance may have the overlay of instruction by a supernatural father-figure, but the action itself receives empirical feedback, and this in turn confirms the legitimacy of the perceived sourcing of the action.
Faith is both a motivator and a check on motivated action. In other words, faith that a given result will be forthcoming motivates the action to bring about that result, but a failed result can cause a questioning of the underlying faith, and either its abandonment or its redirection.
As you rightly noted in a post above, science (to paraphrase) tries, fails, and tries again. In its ideal state, there is inherent in the scientific method an equal measure of expectation for success and failure, although scientists are not immune from persistent faith in the inevitability of success and a concomitant refusal to recognize or concede failure. This has been an exceedingly effective methodology to balance faith as a motivator and a check, and it permits science to evolve, in both result-orientation and process.
But in the same post of yours above, there is an underlying assumption that religion is not, and indeed cannot, evolve in much the same manner. While I think this assumption overlooks the very real evolution of religion that has occurred throughout its history (and that is occurring with, I think, greater rapidity today), I think this is also a very excusable assumption given the doctrinaire intransigence of certain, unfortunately too familiar, religious sects. But doctrinaire intransigence as a brake on evolving thought is not unique to religion. It exists in science, and business, and politics, and art, and just about every human endeavor.
It may well be that, as religion continues to evolve, the notion of a particularized supernatural father-figure will fade away entirely. I have noticed this increasingly in my own religious traditions, and it certainly seems to be the case in the modern propensity to believe in "god," but not to associate with any given denomination or even any particular theological tradition. "Faith" as motivator and check in this kind of religious evolution is not dissimilar at all to "faith" as motivator and check in scientific evolution.